Performing the City

Stream : In this third issue of Stream, we are exploring the major changes in our human condition. Although the idea that we are living in a period of rupture is disputed, what is certain is that our human condition is now an urban condition. This is why we wanted to interview you, given that the city is at the heart of much of your work.

Alain Bublex : I always find it difficult to admit that we are living in a “pivotal period.” I have been hearing over the past thirty years and am left to wonder what period of time hasn’t been disruptive in one sense or another. The 1980s started with the emergence of postmodernism and finished with the fall of the Soviet bloc; the 1990s experienced the development of digital technologies and the Internet. It seems to me that the same happened in the 1970s, with the end of the postwar boom, and in the 1970s, with its generational upheaval (Berkeley, the Cultural Revolution in China, the May 1968 events in Paris, etc.). A bit further back, in the 1950s, it was the beginning of the atomic era and decolonization; before that, World War II, which occurred after the rise of fascism, World War I, the turn of the century and its great inventions, the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of Marxism. I think we could continue reaching back in time for at least two or three hundred years and we would see an endless series of pivotal moments and disruptions. So what makes our time different from any other? Why would this rupture, ours, be a major one and not the others? When can we actually find a long period of stability?

Extension of the urban realm

Regarding global urbanization, we could argue that the movement towards total urbanization started during the eighteenth century and that it is simply more obvious nowadays. Look at the reign of Louis XV and the creation of the technical Grand Corps of Bridges and Roads and the laying out of the royal highways. The landscape was then fully organized starting from the towns, and then from one town to another. The creation of the highways was an opportunity to redraw the surrounding countryside to match the taste of the urban dwellers who were going to use the roads. They had not been drawn to make it easier to discover a region, the rural world, or untamed nature, but on the contrary, to extend the urban area, if only in a limited fashion, circumscribed to the field of view on either side of the road. The ideal countryside was a park, a landscape created by means of guidelines and recommendations—an idealized landscape that was imagined to be the extension of the towns and cities, from one center to another.

Then came the removal of the fortifications which defined a visible boundary isolating the towns from the rest of the territory, and of course, the rural exodus notably in France and England. What we are now seeing throughout the world happened in only a few decades in Europe: we quite brutally shifted from a mainly rural and agricultural world to a mainly urban and industrial one. The size of urban settlements increased dramatically. Nevertheless, in our collective memory, we haven’t registered any particular disruption and the cities where we live today seem to us to have gradually evolved in a continuous and gradual manner from the Middle Ages to the present time.

So maybe what is surprising to us today is that all this is happening somewhere else and that we are now mere spectators and not agents of this change. In Asia and in Africa urbanization is undergoing a similar boom but it troubles us because it is foreign to us. My impression is that total urbanization appears to us as a rupture because our gaze is stuck in the past and we still see urban settlements in a similar fashion as we did during the Middle-Ages—like objects isolated in nature, in a form of opposition between the urban and the rural and between the center and its periphery.

Bastien Gallet : There is indeed a major quantitative change—the number of urban dwellers is increasing and cities are becoming bigger—but what impact does this have on the nature of the city? Must we follow Rem Koolhaas and say that a new city is drawn before our very eyes—what he calls the Generic City—or can we conceive these new megalopolises with existing concepts? Do these quantitative transformations bring about a shift in the concept of the city itself? Do we live differently in a Generic City and a traditional European town? According to Rem Koolhaas, the Generic City is a global phenomenon: it refers to the homogenization that affects all contemporary cities to different degrees and which entails both the end of difference—everything looks the same—and the end of identity—i.e., of history, context, what Koolhaas calls “reality.” In brief, the Generic City is what comes after the city: the world as a City—acentric, superficial, without a history, vertical, multiracial, hyperconnected, but also completely anesthetized. This city has no counterpart—it has conclusively absorbed that which the city has always defined itself with respect to: the desert, the forest, the sea, the mountains, etc., or simply nature. Koolhaas’s question would be: what does a city devoid of an outside look like?

Yet isn’t that what the city has always done without being aware of it? Producing nature—the forest, the mountains, the desert, etc.—as its “other.” This is completely different from the countryside, which is nature insofar as it is civilized and subordinated to the city. Beyond the countryside, the city has always needed an outside relative to which it could found its difference and its identity—but this outside is as elaborate and fantastical. We can therefore argue that the Generic City has erased its “other,” but also that city dwellers now recognize that there has never been an “other,” that the “outside” had always been a projection—there is no more Outside than there is a Nature. From that point of view, the major disruption was the invention of cities. The notion of a city was what made it possible for something to exist as nature.

The great American national parks, such as Yellowstone, are a striking example of this retrospective construction. The aim was to reproduce the America of the beginnings, before the conquest. It was therefore produced like an image, like an immense epic materialized in the landscape. Of course these parks are dysfunctional because they lack the populations that inhabited them and kept their landscapes alive. The Native Americans are missing.

Places and flows

Alain Bublex : The problem with the word “city” is that it induces a specific physical form which we expect to have clear enough spatial and administrative boundaries to be perceptible—I wonder whether this spatial approach is still operational. I remember a talk by Laurent Jeanpierre during the Airs de Paris exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in which he attempted to define the phenomenon of metropolization as distinct from urbanization. The metropolis was to be considered not only as a large city, but to also have other characteristics. He laid out several of these such as the increasing autonomy of communication and transportation channels with a phase shift between circulation and residence, which provokes a juxtaposition of enclaves that either communicate between one another by stepping over certain areas, or that are totally isolated. In such a city, places would no longer be organized according to their proximity to the center but according to their access to different networks and thoroughfares. A metropolis is thus viewed as a partly solid and partly liquid city, and Laurent Jeanpierre suggested using the concept of viscosity to account for the phenomenon. Perhaps improperly, it also makes me think of stretching, and to the surface of bodies of water—which after all is very similar from the oceans to the springs. Basically, wherever we find ourselves, the city would no longer have to do with place but with access.

Augmented practices

Stream : The sociologist Henri Lefebvre believed that modern urbanism had created a form of habitat but not the act of dwelling. The issue at stake is that of the complexity of the uses of a place. Today we can see how difficult it is to enrich these uses. We now work more on spatiality than spaces.

Bastien Gallet :That is the case because uses are neither predictable nor programmable. A good example, which goes back to the question of the outside, are these spaces we call derelict places for lack of a better term—this “other” which is produced by the city within itself: brownfield sites, abandoned buildings, buffer areas, plots of land left behind after the destruction of a building. The city cannot avoid creating these places. It continuously plugs those holes, or tries to do so, because these spaces often have an ambiguous legal status that makes them difficult to develop. Yet they reappear elsewhere, as if the space in de Certeau’s definition was constantly coming back—here under the form of other spaces, interruptions, or stasis within the urban fabric. Things happen there which can no longer happen elsewhere—people meet there, talk together, play together, and do so all the better as these places are unfit for any use. We could say that what happens there is a sociality which is inventing itself, a new form of public space, undiminished by the rules governing its common practice.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin develops a very interesting theory of architecture. He presents it as an art which, in the same way as the cinema and photography, can only be received in distraction—a traditional work of art is distant, however close it may be, whereas an architectural work on the contrary collects its visitors and its inhabitants from within; it penetrates them, all the more as they do not consider it. The inadvertent character of this reception is the reason why it is so profound. We live within architecture whereas we simply contemplate painting—our relationship to it is more tactile than visual. It incidentally influences and transforms our existence, our perceptions, our sensibility, our body, our relation to space. One of the main features of modernity is probably this growing awareness of the effects of architecture and urban planning on urban populations. Le Corbusier was an important thinker on this issue. Of course, he couldn’t have planned what the inhabitants of the Cité Radieuse made of it, but it isn’t for lack of thought on the subject or for trying to inscribe its proper use within the interior and exterior architecture of the building. The challenge was to build not only the house, the neighborhood, or the city, but also the use which would be made of these places, their spatiality. I think this is a necessary, if not always desirable dream.

(This article was published in Stream 03 in 2014.)